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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Deadly, Unna?, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race, Injustice, and Action
Courage and Masculinity
Duty and Sacrifice
Teamwork and Family
Summary
Analysis
The next day, Mark asks Blacky if he’s coming to the oval for more practice. He tosses Blacky a ball, which Blacky immediately drops. Blacky says he’s going home, but he walks down the main street of his town instead. He looks at the anchor which serves as a memorial to the town’s past as a port for English ships. Next to the anchor is a map for summer campers, though Blacky doesn’t think anyone could get lost in a town as small as the Port.
Blacky once again fails to perform successfully with his football skills. His tour of his town and his dismissiveness of its small size show the hopelessness he sees in his community, thus further emphasizing how important the upcoming football game is for everyone.
Themes
Blacky sits on a bench and looks out at the jetty. Blacky loves the jetty and can’t imagine living without it. On the jetty is a shelter where the local boys carve graffiti into the wood. Only boys graffiti the shelter. If a girl’s name appears in the graffiti, the words are usually derogatory and sexual.
Blacky’s beloved jetty and its graffiti will become a key point of the racial conflicts of the town. Now, the jetty shows the misogynistic attitudes toward women in Blacky’s community.
Themes
Blacky can see the Point off in the distance. He’s never been to the Point, though once he and his friend Dazza, decided they would go there together. But then they remembered the stories they’d heard at the local pub about residents of the Point carrying spears and boomerangs and attacking people. These thoughts scared the boys, so they returned to the Port.
Pickles, one of Blacky’s best friends, approaches Blacky. Pickles farts and spits out something disgusting before sitting down, and Blacky reflects on how gross his friend’s behavior is. Pickles is a worse football player than many of the players from the Point, but because Pickles is from the Port and his parents spend a lot of money at Arks’s store, Pickles remains on the team. Pickles is more interested in girls than football anyway.
Racism is so normalized in Blacky’s community that he doesn’t challenge the unfairness of Pickles being picked for the team essentially just because he is a white member of the Port. Pickles embodies a typical male in Blacky’s community, rough in appearance with hypersexualized attitudes toward women.
Themes
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Pickles talks about how if the team wins the grand final, many girls will want to date them, while Blacky thinks about how Pickles always has a filthy rash. Pickles says they have to win this game, for the sake of his romantic life. Blacky notes that’s just one more responsibility for him. Pickles begins bragging, and lying, about his most recent sexual encounter.
Pickles’s obsession and hypersexualization of women continues. Blacky feels increased pressure on his football skills, even if that pressure is comes from something as absurd as Pickles’s romantic aspirations.
Themes
Blacky believes Pickles has truly terrible hygiene, but he hangs out with him anyway because there aren’t very many kids his age in town and their fathers are friends.
Community and the approval of others is essential in Blacky’s life because he doesn’t have anyone else to spend time with in his rural small town.
Themes
Pickles spots Blacky’s father’s fishing boat out on the ocean. According to Blacky, Pickles sees the boat before Blacky does because Pickles is a born fisherman. As soon as he can, Pickles will drop out of school and begin fishing for a living, just as his father and grandfather did. Blacky doesn’t want to be a fisherman, but he is jealous that Pickles at least knows what he wants to be when he grows up.
There are limited options for what role a man can play in Blacky’s poor community. Blacky’s society is also one that values fishing skills (which Pickles possesses) over academic skills (which Blacky possesses). This moment emphasizes Blacky’s outsider status within his community and his hopelessness about ever finding his place there.
Themes
The boats pull into the jetty, meaning they have fish to sell. Pickles wants to go see what the fishermen caught but Blacky makes an excuse to go home. Pickles knows this is because Blacky doesn’t want to be near his father’s boat, which Blacky has been afraid of since being caught in a bad storm. Blacky thinks about how the storm is only part of that night, and only he and his father know the whole story. Blacky notes that he’ll have to tell the truth about what happened, even though he doesn’t want to.
Blacky cannot express his true feelings of shame and fear to supposedly one of his oldest and closest friends, because men in his community cannot show weakness or negative emotion. The reader can tell that whatever memory he’s referencing deeply affects him, however, because Blacky says that he has to bring up the memory for the sake of the narrative.
Themes
